5 cool details for better Apple products

I’ve dreamed up five cool product improvements Apple really should adopt. Do you agree?

Continuity

It is great to be able to work seamlessly across your Mac, iPhone and iPad, but the phone call feature in Continuity/Handoff is a new kind of madness. You can be sitting innocently working and all of your devices ring at once. What can you do? Well, you can switch off phone alerts on each device, but why should you need to do that, only to change them as the situation changes? Given the location sensing built into iOS devices, would it not make sense for a user to be able to assign a primary device on which to receive alerts (if in the same area) while all others default to a vibrating alert? It would be a pretty cool feature, you’d still not miss your calls, but the cacophony of calling tones would be less likely to drive you up the wall!

iTunes Match

With a 16,000-track music library I love the convenience of having all my music always available on all of my devices. Except, that is, when I’m not connected to a network — that’s when I get annoyed because I need to quit my Music app in order to access Settings>Music and turn off the ‘Show All Tracks’ feature solely in order to see what music is currently available on my device. The solution is so simple: just put this setting as an option in Control Center. Why not? I bet I need to swap this setting more often than I fly on an “Airplane”. Does no one on the iOS development team listen to music any more? They can’t all have private jets!

Music export

Also on a music tip — I sometimes like to export my music to other Macs. I can use iTunes Match for this but not everyone uses it. I’ve always been a little infuriated by the way in which iTunes nests all the music in files on your drive, Apple doesn’t make it easy for users to export their collections to other hard drives or computers. So why not add “Gather for Export” and “Export to …” features to iTunes for Mac. It’s not as if the music is DRM-protected any more, and every user wants a reliable way to keep their music safe.

App demos

When exploring the App Stores I frequently find apps that sounds interesting but cost cash. When I come across items like these I’m forced to figure out if a free version of the software is available — I must decide to download or to ignore the app. Developers can offer free versions of apps, but cannot offer time- or feature-limited demos for potential customers to try. Is there not some way in which this kind of functionality can be provided? Developers want everyone to try their solutions, and consumers deserve to know if their investment is justified.

Serious Siri

Siri is improving but is still nowhere near as useful as a the Hitchhiker’s Guide‘s notion of a Babel Fish. One thing it could do but doesn’t is translate. Think about it: You are wandering through a strange street in a foreign place, how useful would it be if you could ask Siri to translate signs and conversation for you? This kind of tech is already available and will only improve: SpeechTrans, iTranslate, Translate Professional. This will be a standard smartphone feature one day, but the future is already happening. Why not do this?

I hope you’ve enjoyed these suggestions. How would you improve your Apple products?

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